Peterstaler Mineralquellen establishes its own counting centre

Deposit on non-refillable foreign bottles is secured

The German producer of mineral water, Peterstaler Mineralquellen, operates a PET filling system and fills about 40 million PET cycle bottles a year. However, when the crates with the empty bottles are returned to Peterstaler, there are foreign bottles mixed in with the company’s own.

Until now, the bottles have been sorted manually, requiring many man hours and, by mistake, many bottles ended in the PET crusher, whereby the deposit of EUR 0.25 on each non-refillable bottle was lost.

Therefore, Anker Andersen worked out a solution for Peterstaler, and as of December 2007, three HLZ high-speed counting machines have been in operation at the company. The high-speed counting machines count and sort bottles at an amazing speed, and Peterstaler has now total control of the counting process and is saving both time and money.

Through the all-inclusive solution provided by Anker Andersen, Peterstaler has been certified as a counting centre by DPG (Deutsche Pfandsystem GmbH). Anker Andersen attended to all aspects in connection with the certification and has also taken over the maintenance work on the HLZ counting machines.

The HLZ machines installed at Peterstaler are operated by one person, and every year, they register about 1.5–2.0 million foreign bottles, securing the deposit value of these bottles.

Peterstaler is not only highly satisfied with the all-inclusive solution and the service provided by Anker Andersen, the performance of the HLZ machines have also fulfilled every expectation so far, and Peterstaler expects that the investment will have paid for itself within two years.

Marcel Meyer, authorised representative of Peterstaler, makes the following statements:

“In order to decide whether we should establish our own counting centre, we weighed up the advantages and disadvantages and prepared a cost-benefit analysis which clearly came out in favour of purchasing the machines from Anker Andersen. We expect a payback period of less than two years”.The installation proceeded very satisfactorily. You can rely on Anker Andersen. The engineer on site took care of everything and answered all our questions right away.”

Going forward, it will become even more important for PET cycle bottlers to deal with the issue of foreign bottles in PET cycle crates as the number of foreign bottles has risen considerably during the last few years and are set to rise even further in the years to come. However, the solution is simple – a HLZ high-speed counting machine from Anker Andersen!